Rabindranath Tagore (1861–1941) was a Bengali poet and the first non-Westerner to win the Nobel Prize in Literature (1913). While he is most popularly known as a poet, Tagore is also considered a prominent novelist, musician, painter, and playwright. Comparable to Shakespeare in his use of the Bengali language and to Ezra Pound in modernizing Bengali literature, Tagore wrote moving and passionate spiritual verse. Today, while widely popular in both Bangladesh and India — for both of which he had written national anthems — his work is still largely unknown in the West.